


For a Night

by Methoxyethane



Series: Blood Magic For Beginners [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Hunter Keith, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Witch Lance (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 16:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Methoxyethane/pseuds/Methoxyethane
Summary: Keith may have come for the witch’s incredible healing abilities, but he always stayed for the company.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Series: Blood Magic For Beginners [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618714
Comments: 10
Kudos: 191





	For a Night

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday CC

This world was still fresh and healing after the open wound that was the Alice Riots, wherein not only was every supernatural creature exposed for what they were and then driven to madness by an airborne drug, but also at the same time the only supernatural police force that existed wasn’t capable of handling it because they were having a slight internal war and subsequent personnel upheaval at the exact same time. 

It had been… a mess. Keith had still been a part of a gang at the time, but being as he was a mirror in hiding as a frankenstein at the time there’d been nothing for him to transform into. He’d also been in a gang full of other Luminarian monsters like him though, with no one to go crazy and fight with but each other. It had been the perfect time of chaos for Keith to slip out and start a new life, but he’d had to fight his way out in the process and had nearly died.

Which is where Lance came in. Lance had picked his bloody body up off the streets and instead of abandoning him at a hospital where his injuries would have most likely killed him, taken him into his own apartment and healed his rather extensive wounds. Using blood magic, which was only about half a scary as it sounded.

Keith had expected the gang to come after him. What Keith had not expected was for Blackholt to come after him too, thinking they had bigger priorities in the wake of their ruined police empire. What he has expected least of all was for them to be doing better things indeed - that being a giant recruitment drive where they were so desperate for cops who wouldn’t sell them out again they were even willing to give harbor to ex-crooks like Keith.

So Keith had become an officer of Blackholt. Lance remained in his own life as a witch/med student, letting Keith stay at his place until he could afford to move out on his own. Which Keith had done a few months ago. And had since very nearly come to regret doing at all.

Moving out was… lonely, Keith had discovered. He had lived with gang members or foster children or Lance his entire life, and didn’t know how to live by himself, to cook for just one person, to… be alone. He knew how to FEEL alone, how to trust no one and make no close friends out of fear they’d stab you in the back, but he didn’t know how to fill a space with his own objects and make a life for himself. 

He missed Lance’s homey little apartment. Even missed the smell of weed and blood magic that permeated the air and made the entire apartment smell warm and homey.

So he spent a lot of time going back. Lance didn’t seem to mind - always smiled when he came by and offered him a beer or a bowl of weed, never asked for anything in return and never fought back when Keith insisted on buying dinner in recompense. 

Keith just wished that he didn’t need to keep coming over under… less than ideal circumstances. That being, because he needed things only the witch could provide. He’d rather just be visiting Lance for the sake of seeing him again, but alas, Lance’s blood stash was vital to Keith and he had to keep coming for business more than pleasure.

Like today. Keith was a mirror by birth and that meant not only being able to change species, but being a huge sweetly-scented target for anything carnivorous. It was a convenient bait in crime fighting but a pain in the ass afterwords, and his need for blood samples to change species was just… draining. On himself and on Lance’s blood supply. 

He was a vampire right now, and one who’d just gotten his ass kicked by a gang of werewolves. He and Shiro had come out on top in the end, but now it was nearing dawn and Keith was limping his way to Lance’s apartment because he needed somewhere safe to crash before the sun came up. He just hoped Lance wouldn’t mind.

At least as a vampire it was no trouble to scramble his way up to the third floor balcony to climb in through Lance’s window. He’d done it in much less favorable circumstances in the past, and was happy to have the ability to get there in about half a second compared to his normal several moments of prolonged climbing.

After he reached the top, he stopped for a moment. Knocked politely, and then shimmied the window open and crawled inside.

To his surprise, he found Lance awake, sitting at his kitchen table with the light on and yawning into a textbook. “Hey, Keithy-kins.” He greeted idly, rubbing at his eyes. “Is that fresh blood I smell? If it is tell me it’s not all over my carpet.”

Keith looked down at his feet, where he was indeed dripping blood all over the floor. “Not… on the carpet, no,” he said, stepping back onto the bare wood of the floors.

Lance rolled his eyes so hard his entire head went with him, closing his textbook with a sigh. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Five AM,” Keith answered, now awkwardly exiled to the strip of hardwood next to the window and off of Lance’s rug. 

Lance finally looked up at him. Jerked his head back in alarm when he caught sight of Keith’s bloodied and battered form, all but knocking over his chair in his haste to scramble out of it and over to Keith’s side. “Fuck me, what happened to you!”

Keith shrugged. “Work. You know how it is in the gang crimes division,” was the only thing he deigned to answer with. The details weren’t important anyway.

Lance pulled him from the corner he’d been exiled into, dragging him all the way to the kitchen where Lance did most of his magic work. And where the floors were tiled and easier to clean up. 

“Take off your coat,” Lance directed tiredly, opening up one of the cabinets to pull out his first aid kit. Eyed Keith up and down, gaze locking in on where the blood was pouring from a wound on Keith’s abdomen. “And your shirt, too.”

Keith did both, leaving himself exposed in Lance’s cold morning kitchen. He probably should have felt vulnerable or something, but by this point he’d been stitched together by Lance so many times it almost felt more normal to be here half naked under the witch’s gaze than it did to be fully clothed.

Naked was fine, but Lance’s eyes and hands on him were always the part that started to feel intimate. Lance was poking at his wound now to see how deep the claw marks went, if they were deep enough to need to do work on Keith’s organs too or if it was all surface wounds. Keith himself had no idea, of course, but he trusted Lance to be able to do his business, and do it the right way.

Not that healing up morons like Keith was actually Lance’s real job. Not yet anyway. Being a blood witch meant his magic was capable of doing just about anything he wanted or needed to do to a human or non-human living body, from making plants grow all the way down to exploding a man where he stood. Theoretically. Keith had never seen Lance make anyone explode before, but considering that he could heal a body in mere minutes it only made sense that he could destroy one even faster.

“The wounds aren’t deep, but they’re everywhere and it looks like you lost a ton of blood.” Lance frowned, inspecting Keith’s battered body. “How much pain are you in?”

Keith, as someone who had experienced having his hand chopped off as recently as last month, wasn’t sure how to answer that honestly. “Like a five, probably?”

“Out of ten?” Lance asked, one eyebrow raised. “And you aren’t even flinching.”

Keith shrugged. “I’m used to pain by now. I’m not really bothered by this.” More than anything, he just wanted to sleep, but he knew he needed to get healed up before he could do that. Or else he might. You know, die or whatever.

Lance frowned at him and heaved out a tired sigh, but when he pulled a crow’s feather out of his hair Keith knew he was keeping his judgements to himself. The feather, he’d explained before, was something from a living being, and had replaced traditional wooden wands as conduits for power generations ago. Wands didn’t burn up like feathers and leaves did, but having been dead for too long they couldn’t channel power as easily as something more… fresh was able to. In Keith’s opinion they were also much creepier than a wand would have been, but he wasn’t the blood witch here and it wasn’t his magic being used to heal an idiot right now, so. 

The smell of blood magic warmed up the air, sizzling green with life as Lance’s magic slowly stitched Keith’s wounds together. This part hurt more than receiving the wounds had in the fucking first place, but no one ever said healing wounds DIDN’T hurt and Keith could take whatever Lance could dish out at him with grit teeth and a few grunts of discomfort.

All magic required balance, and the cost of blood magic was obvious just from its name. Small spells, Lance had explained, could be done sacrificing only a bit of saliva or even sweat, but big ones like this required blood to compensate. Usually Keith could feel himself getting dizzier as Lance burned off the blood from inside his veins, but it looks like this time Lance was using his own blood for the spell because Keith was holding steady onto consciousness during the entirety of the healing process.

“Are you gonna be alright?” Keith asked, hoping he wasn’t breaking Lance’s concentration. “You’re not using my blood. Don’t you kind of need yours?”

“Not as much as you need it,” Lance mumbled back. “It’s fine, just think of it as a transfusion.”

“But you need yours for magic,” Keith argued. “For your job.”

“And you need yours to live!” Lance answered back cheerfully as the feather gradually burned off into nothingness in his hand while his magic worked. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? Because you wanted to keep living?”

“I mean, in general, I guess.” Keith shrugged back.

Lance laughed, and the claw marks covering Keith’s torso healed off into thin pink lines. “I’m serious, Keith. I know you think you're invincible, or maybe just don’t care if you die, but I really wish you’d take care of yourself.”

Keith swallowed the guilt down into his stomach, glancing away. “Yeah, I’ve been causing you a lot of trouble lately, haven’t I?” 

Lance clicked his tongue, and the feather turned into ashes all the way down to the root, burned out with completed magic. “That’s not what I mean,” he said shortly. “You always talk like there’s no one who worries about you, even now. Can’t I just…” His fingers lingered on one of the pink scars left over from the wounds tonight, olive green fingertips brushing lightly against Keith’s bare skin. The touch was slight but intimate, and it made Keith’s breath catch in his throat. “...Want you to be safe?”

Keith shivered as Lance’s hand withdrew, and he ignored the secret part of him that wished for Lance’s touch to linger. 

“I better get you a new shirt,” Lance said with a tired smile. “Yours is kind of in blood soaked tatters, which. Not great for sleeping.”

Keith chuckled lightly, following Lance to his bedroom where the witch stepped inside his closet to dig around for a shirt Keith might use. It only took him a moment to come back with a tee shirt for Keith, handing it to him and waiting politely in the closet while Keith pulled it on over his head.

The shirt was a dark green and sporting a pun about cannabis, but it smelled like Lance and so Keith was more than content to wear it, following him back into the living room to plop down onto his favorite part of Lance’s couch.

Lance turned the TV on with a click of his X-Box controller, turning on Love It or List It for background noise and glancing out the window to where the sun was barely beginning to rise. “We’re gonna need to get some blood into you before the sun rises, aren’t we? I chose this apartment like 80% based on how much sunlight it gets for my plants.”

Oh, Keith supposed that was true. Being a vampire in this particular apartment was less than ideal, and there was probably nowhere to hide from the sun. “Got anything enough for me to drink?” He asked, feeling suddenly hungry at all this talk of blood. 

“Just one,” Lance said, already rummaging around his refrigerator and pulling out an entire IV pack of blood, as compared to the vials of blood he usually kept lining his fridge shelves. “Bakeneko.”

That wasn’t a name he recognized, but he’d take just about anything at this point and totally trusted Lance’s judgement besides. It was too bad he’d just spent all that blood on his magic, because Keith would love the excuse to drink directly from Lance’s neck, probably say it was because he’d never tried being a blood witch before but really he just wanted to feel Lance’s pulse under his tongue…

Lance returned to the couch, tossing him the packet of blood and coming back with a chicken leg to snack on - raw meat which he then consumed bone and all like a vulture swallowing a rat. Keith had gotten used to Lance’s… unusual dietary needs by now, but it would never stop being just a little bit gross to hear the bones crunching under razor sharp teeth.

But not gross enough to deter Keith’s own appetite, as he bit into the blood pack and sucked it out like a capri-sun. 

He sucked it down fast, before the change could take over his body and he was no longer a vampire and this blood stopped being of any use to anyone. Lance rarely had regular person food, snacking mostly on bones he got from the butcher shop like he was crunching down candy. Whatever he did keep he kept for Keith, but there was a chance that Keith had eaten everything Lance had bought already the last time he was over.

“Where did you get so much of this stuff, anyway?” Keith asked when he blood was drained and he was sated, just in time as he felt the change start to tingle from his stuttering heartbeat down to his toes. It was a fast process now, only taking a few short minutes once he got a foreign blood sample into his system. 

“A client,” Lance said, finishing his own meal and glancing over at Keith from the TV. “She understood that I’d need a blood sample to make my magic work for her, but didn’t understand that I only needed a sample and not an entire quart of blood. I just kind of bought it off her,” he laughed. 

Keith’s threw the empty blood packet into the trash near his end of the couch, figuring it couldn’t possibly stink up the place any worse than the smell of weed and blood magic already did. “I appreciate that you did,” he said, feeling as his ears started to shift up to the top of his head inch by gradual, bizarre inch. That was weird. “What’s uh… what’s a bakeneko anyway?”

Lance burst out laughing, reaching over to the table where his pipe sat. “You don’t know? Isn’t it part of your job to have encyclopedic knowledge of all monstrous Luminarian species and subspecies? Like, at least your duty as a mirror. Being able to turn into them all, and all.”

Keith felt a growl rumble out of his throat, a clue that whatever a bakeneko was it was animalistic in nature. “Don’t make fun of me! I’m doing my best, but I spent most of my life hiding out and not changing into anything at all!”

Lance just laughed again, taking a hit off his bowl. “You’ll figure it out soon.”

Soon indeed, as Keith felt a tail starting to whip it’s way out of his backside to crowd up the back of his pants. Ah, hell. He was a fucking catboy, wasn’t he?

“You just gave me this to make fun of me, didn’t you,” He accused Lance, snatching the pipe from his hands to take a hit of his own. 

“I gave it to you because I had it!” Lance giggled, sinking deep into the couch. “Unless you wanted to go hungry tonight? Because that was always an option too, you didn’t need to drink the whole thing right there.”

Keith hummed in discontent, reaching up with his hands to feel the fur on triangle-shaped ears. Yup. Definitely a catboy. Fuck, of course Lance wouldn’t just say as much. It was way funnier to just watch Keith suffer.

He heaved out a deep sigh, settling into the couch and letting his tail lash it’s way out of the top of his pants. He ended up leaning against Lance’s side, even though there was plenty of room on the couch for him to spread out. It was warmer by Lance’s side, and soon Lance wound an arm up around Keith’s shoulders to hold him close.

Keith leaned his head down onto Lance’s shoulder, settling in to soak up the witch’s body heat. Keith had never experienced the kind of warmth he felt in Lance’s little apartment, and now here in his arms it was even warmer. Everything about Lance was green, from his olive skin to his plant filled home to the smell that rolled off his body, everything was always warm and pleasantly  _ green _ .

Lance’s hand started stroking down Keith’s shoulder, and Keith sunk even further into his friend with a pleased little sigh. He ended up with his head on Lance’s chest and his feet slung over Lance’s thighs, curled up like a cat on his lap. Whoops. Blame it on the bakeneko blood, if Lance tried to make fun of him for this later.

Just as Keith was starting to doze off to the sounds of HGTV, Lance’s hand stopped idly stroking him. And just as Keith was thinking that was a little disappointing but he was about to fall asleep anyway so it would have to do, Lance’s hand moved up to his ear, scratching at the fur at the base of his cat’s ear.

And  _ ohhhh _ , that felt NICE. Keith all but melted into a puddle of vaguely people-shaped goo, feeling the rumble of Lance’s laughter under his head. Keith let himself sink into it, let Lance keep petting at his ear, and eventually felt the rumble of of a purr swelling up from deep within his chest.

He wanted to be embarrassed by it, but he was too content to care right now. He was in the only space he felt safe, and he was warm, and a cute boy was petting his ears like the cat he currently was. His only regret was that he couldn’t stay awake longer for it. 

Somewhere in the shallow end of sleep, he felt something soft brush against his forehead. If it was Lance’s fingers or his lips, Keith would never know.


End file.
